The automation of language translation has attracted considerable interest over the last decades. This interest is fuelled by a constantly growing demand for translations as the world is growing together not only because of world-wide business activities. Machine translation addresses the problem of automated translation of human language. Although considerable progress has been made, numerous problems remain to be solved not only because of complexity of human language.
Kay, M., The proper place of men and machines in language translation, Machine Translation, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, vol. 12, pages 3 to 23 discusses the opportunities of machine translation in view of linguistics, and proposes a translator's amanuensis, incorporating into a word processor some simple facilities peculiar to translation. Kay suggests that gradual enhancements of such a system could eventually lead to the original goal of machine translation. One of the major problems in linguistics remains resolving ambiguities of language. Ambiguities result from a variety of features in linguistics, one of which being prepositional attachment. Furthermore, a word may have a plurality of meanings and a plurality of functions in an expression, such as a phrase or a sentence. In addition, associations among words may be ambiguous, resulting in a plurality of meanings of an expression.
In prior art translation systems, an ambiguous input expression must be disambiguated during analysis, before further processing can continue, even if the system cannot know which meaning, i.e. reading, of a plurality of possible meanings is correct. As a consequence of an unmotivated and premature disambiguation, the correct, or most appropriate, analysis is often discarded, and the system produces a wrong translation. Some prior art systems aim to resolve this problem by generating a plurality of possible translations, and selecting one that is most likely to represent the correct translation. These systems may evaluate the plurality of possible translations, and select a translation based on some statistical properties. The selected translation may neutralize the ambiguity. However, these systems amass costs in terms of computation to be done.